Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (Spike Milligan War Memoirs)

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He wrote seven short books about the experience based on his diaries, here's the first one which concerns joining the army, training, starting a jazz band during training, more training, exploits/hijinks/affairs, and finally getting shipped off to Northern Africa, where the book ends. The book contains plenty of surprising and frequently outrageous anecdotes, many of which are loud out loud funny. In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. As a lover of music, the talk of Milligan forming a band, playing gigs and their love for jazz made me unbearably happy. He is left off long enough to go to a BBC musician contest, where as a trumpet player, he wins a recording session with an established artist.

Milligan says in the preface: "All the salient facts are true"; at the end of the preface: "There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been the first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I'm sure, the key to victory. And while at times I enjoyed that style, and had to laugh because of what I read, at other points it came across a little forces.

I would sugest that people should endevour to get the original version to get an understanding of the total cock- up that he was thrown into in his first few days of the war. Dale was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles for his performance. Volume one of Spike Milligan's legendary memoirs is a hilarious, subversive first-hand account of WW2'The most irreverent, hilarious book about the war that I have ever read' Sunday Express'Close in stature to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in his command of the profound art of nonsense' Guardian______________'At Victoria station the R. The family response is for Spike, his father and brother to produce boyish drawings of war machines (the drawings are included in the book), which are taken to the War Office. At my side is a paperback copy of Book 4 of his war time memoirs and the photos in it are much crisper, even if page size is only slightly larger.

Dated or not, he captures the feel of his life in the ranks and reflects how his refusal to be overly impressed by rank or be forced into the standard image of a like one, like all soldier. Ultimately, however, Milligan published seven volumes covering his war service, his first nervous breakdown and reallocation to rear-echelon duties, his demob and early years trying to break into the entertainment industry. Like the potentilly funny scene where Spike and his sargent are being chased by a bull but find out that it's really a cow.

He was of Irish descent, but spent most of his childhood in India and lived most of his later life in England, moving to Australia after retirement. Yes, that is what some of this book, the first in the series of wartime memoirs by celebrated British comedian Spike Milligan (who was, coincidentally, the inspiration for Monty Python in the first place with his group act 'The Goon Show'), would feel like: hilarious, anarchic, almost brutally sarcastic, bawdy and guaranteed to leave you in splits. There is also Bill Maynard as the sargent and fellow recruits Tony Selby and "Keeping Up Appearences" Onslow, Geoffrey Hughes but they don't do much with them Lowe who know's his character well comes off best of the supporting cast and Dale is wonderfully demented as Spike, but the film doesn't take off. I'm a big Jim Dale fan and love comedian Spike Milligan, so when I swa this movie was based on Spike Milligan's sidesplitting autobiography and that Jim Dale was plying Spike and the wonderfully demented Spike was playing his father I was looking foward to this film, but was very disapointed.

There are vividly nightmarish scenes of nerve-wracking despair meshed ingeniously in between the more rib-tickling sequences; there is also a heightened sense of the irreparable damage that destruction and death leave on mere mortals, not least of all the hapless troops marching to war themselves.

This is a re-read for me; I think I read it for the first time in paperback about a decade ago, but when I saw the Scribd e-library had all seven volumes in audiobook format read by the man himself, I couldn't resist reading them again. Sorry, your eyesight isn’t up to what we need for a pilot; however, we have a number of vacancies for rear gunners. Luckily I was in the man cave whilst my other half slept like Tutankhamun's long-dehydrated corpse in the next room.